pauraque_bk | books!

At some point I got so behind on posting about books that I just gave up, so I'm granting myself amnesty. Here's my impressions of a couple of books I read while I was on vacation.

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde. The first half or so, recounting her childhood and adolescence, I found completely riveting. The portrait of her complex relationship with her mother is especially memorable, and at some points is imbued with a sensual eroticism that toes the line of incest fantasy — which was not a problem for me, but something I imagine some people would want to know going in.

I was often surprised at which events in her early life seem to have been formative for her, and which not. The suicide of her best friend as a teenager had the impact of a nuclear blast, and returns again and again in the narrative. Yet, when Audre is raped, it's skimmed over almost casually and never mentioned further.

The latter half of the book talks about her experiences in the lesbian community in the 50s, and I think is not as strongly written as what came before. There are so many fascinating women in this book whose stories deserve to be told, yet at some point there start to be too many of them — names start to blur together and you're thinking, wait, who was this one? I think it might have worked better for me if she'd pared it down to talking in depth about just a few of her friends and lovers, not (seemingly) every single one.

I also found the way she wrote about sex left me oddly cold, like I wasn't able to quite connect with the emotions that she obviously felt in those situations. Which was odd, because when the sexuality was more sublimated, it worked much better for me — the hottest scene in the book by far was one that described learning to prepare food with her mother's mortar and pestle.

Overall, I had a mixed but positive impression. I've actually never read her poetry, but maybe it's time.

Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley. This was very much in the film noir genre, with plenty of atmosphere, intrigue... and a plot that eventually lost me. I did enjoy the book, though, mostly for the sharply drawn characters, as well as smart social commentary that's always shown, never just told. You get to see and feel how the characters respond to each other, constantly aware of how they're navigating race, class, and gender. It's good stuff.

I want to point out that there's really good use of dialect writing in the dialogue. When some authors do this, they go overboard and it becomes off-putting. Here it's used as an effective tool to subtly express the kind of code-switching that the characters do, consciously and not, when they're speaking to people in different social positions. (Blame JK Rowling for making me hyper-aware of when authors do dialect and how well it's working.)

I do have to say that the sex scenes were like super anti-sexy, at least for me, and I didn't feel like it was intentional. There's a certain way that sex is sometimes written in literary fiction, where it comes off like the author is trying way too hard to make it not sound like porn, and it ends up just being pretentious and weird. Even though this is a genre novel, the sex scenes were totally like that. It's a minor part of the book and a minor peeve, but there it is.

I also just read The Casual Vacancy finally, but that's a whole other post.

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